Donald Trump has repeatedly said he won’t release his taxes because he’s under audit. But that dubious rationale has been disputed by Warren Buffett, among many others. A week ago, Trump gave himself away by saying he would release his tax returns immediately if Hillary Clinton produced her deleted personal emails. "Let her release emails. I'll release my […]

Trump did an interview with Russia Today where he continued his perturbing habit of being more favorably inclined toward Vladimir Putin than to his own country. Chuck Todd reacted with a level of indignation typically reserved for Clinton, exclaiming, “Donald Trump went on Russian propaganda television to trash the American press corps!” Watch the clip:

Racism and White Nationalism In August, Hillary Clinton delivered a pivotal speech detailing Trump’s centering of white nationalism in his campaign and his mainstreaming of their ugly constellation of bigotries, which culminated with his hiring of Steven Bannon as his campaign’s chief executive. (He followed up by hiring sleaze-merchant and president of Citizens United David Bossie a few […]

The reaction to Fallon’s softball Trump interview was swift: https://twitter.com/MariaErnandez3b/status/776722856927432704 https://twitter.com/JeffreyGoldberg/status/776768620139388928 https://twitter.com/aminatou/status/776647702432124929 https://twitter.com/Ateeya/status/776633870598959104 https://twitter.com/KAmorphous/status/776732092285812737 "Wow, Donald Trump went on Jimmy Fallon, acted cute, & let Jimmy mess up his hair! I guess that erases the years of Trump's hate speech!" — Eric Wolfson (@EricWolfson) September 16, 2016 Jimmy Fallon: Don't put Trump on TV & […]

Watch as a reporter begins to ask about Ryan’s criticisms of Trump, and Ryan interrupts with a joke, prompting a huge round of uproarious laughter: When everyone finally settles down, Pence finally gives a punt of an answer about how much he and his running mate respect Ryan and how there are always differences in […]

I’ve been covering the grossly imbalanced coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump for the duration of the 2016 campaign. The double standard against Clinton has reached new lows and the frenzy to take her down is at a fever pitch. I tried to capture it all in a recent piece titled R.I.P. Political Journalism (1440-2016). In July […]

This is astonishing by any standards. Mike Pence defends Donald Trump's praise of Vladimir Putin: 'Inarguable' that Putin is a stronger leader than Obama https://t.co/dmjkTvpaMA — Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 9, 2016 Trump’s ghostwriter: Trump reveres Putin. He wants Putin's power. He wants to be a dictator. Every American — every American — should […]

Politico recently ran an experiment in which they fact checked every statement by either campaign for a five-day period. The results were staggering: According to POLITICO’s five-day analysis Trump averaged about one falsehood every three minutes and 15 seconds over nearly five hours of remarks. In raw numbers, that’s 87 erroneous statements in five days. The message […]

With a few tweets and demeaning nicknames, Donald Trump handily dispatched some of the most powerful and well-funded Republicans in the country. So why is he struggling against Hillary Clinton in the general election despite a monumental and well-documented effort by the national media to tilt the playing field in his favor? Prof. Thomas Patterson examined […]

Humans have an uncanny ability to deny the obvious, even when the obvious is an existential threat. In the case of the 2016 election, we are looking at the potential end of the American experiment. That is a sentiment expressed by a range of scholars and public figures across the political spectrum. On May 18, […]

Here is a sample of what it would be like if Hillary Clinton switched places with Donald Trump: #JustImagineHillary saying our military is the gang that couldn't shoot straight. — Peter Daou (@peterdaou) September 20, 2016 #JustImagineHillary saying a woman's pregnancy is "an inconvenience for a business." — Mindy Mendelsohn (@MindyMendelsoh1) September 20, 2016 https://twitter.com/VonHammersmark7/status/778052295430987776 https://twitter.com/anne_seely/status/778056005854728192 […]

Speaking to Sean Hannity in 2015, Donald Trump said this: The problem we have right now—we have a society that sits back and says we don’t have to do anything. Eventually, the 50 percent cannot carry—and it’s unfair to them—but cannot carry the other 50 percent. Trump echoed the same sentiment in an interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt: […]

THE CLINTON RULES In July of 2015, reporter Jonathan Allen famously defined the Clinton Rules: “The Clinton rules are driven by reporters’ and editors’ desire to score the ultimate prize in contemporary journalism: the scoop that brings down Hillary Clinton and her family’s political empire.” Independent studies have reinforced Allen’s observation, concluding Clinton has received the most negative coverage […]

Four decades ago, “the Justice Department filed a civil rights case that accused the Trump firm, whose complexes contained 14,000 apartments, of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.” And that racialized hostility has continued, finding a home on Trump’s Twitter feed. Sadly, because president Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won't […]

John McCain has some Trump Trouble. Trump is not the sort of candidate a war hero like McCain wants to support, given Trump’s willingness to refer to the U.S. military as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight” and attack a Gold Star family. Trump even attacked McCain himself, saying, in reference to McCain having been a […]

Hillary Clinton has weathered one of the toughest periods of her campaign and Team Trump can’t be happy about his 7-point deficit in the new NBC/WSJ poll: In two-way race, Clinton leads Trump by 7pts among both likely and reg voters, per new natl NBC/WSJ poll pic.twitter.com/8fcl32a75e — Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 21, 2016 Notably, Trump’s unpopularity is more than […]

On a day when Donald Trump has again invoked the assassination of Hillary Clinton, this response, from Kierna Mayo, is stunning in its simplicity and power: Time is winding down and most of the 2016 race is in the rear view mirror. The view is ugly. https://twitter.com/Shakestweetz/status/776930224730673152 Hillary Clinton’s emails have been covered by major media […]

Over the course of a week, the corporate media largely ignored a half dozen Trump transgressions that would have sidelined any other candidate. Among them: saying the U.S. military was a “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” We covered the story as soon as Trump’s words were posted online, and credit to Alex Burns for picking it up and tweeting […]

In a piece crediting the New York Times for (finally) forcefully challenging Trump on (one of) his most recent lies, Peter Beinart prescribes the following: [Debate moderators]—Lester Holt, Martha Raddatz, Anderson Cooper and Chris Wallace—must be prepared to confront Trump in ways they’ve never confronted a candidate before. The more audaciously he lies, the more […]

If there is any lesson we learned from the Bush era, it’s that the answer to terrorism isn’t to undermine our own values. When we devolve into a culture of torture, when we curtail civil liberties, we play into our enemies’ hands. With that perspective in mind, read this June 29 NBC News article: Donald Trump on Tuesday […]

One of the interesting aspects of Donald Trump getting the Republican nomination despite not being the favorite of the GOP establishment is that he’s had trouble finding people to work with and for him from that establishment. So he’s ended up with a running mate who endorsed Ted Cruz and a campaign manager whose past […]

"Let her release emails. I'll release my tax returns immediately" – Trump, showing "routine audit" isn't why he won't release tax returns — John Harwood (@JohnJHarwood) September 7, 2016 The full quote, from an interview with Bill O’Reilly, further reveals the disingenuousness of Trump’s rationale: I am under a routine audit, and when it’s completed […]

This clip is swiftly making the rounds: Here's video of Don King accidentally dropping the N-word while introducing Donald Trump at a Cleveland church pic.twitter.com/HK4FWpVEC0 — Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) September 21, 2016 Reaction was immediate: https://twitter.com/SymoneDSanders/status/778606805895217152 Don King just introduced Trump at a rally referring to Michael Jackson and a "dancing and sliding and gliding […]

Trump doesn’t appear to care about victims of public acts of violence, nor does he care about what reverberating effects his commentary might have on people who commit these acts. All he cares about is braying, even if incorrectly, about how he “called it.” After the recent attack in New York City, Trump’s primary concern […]

Watch: Oh really, @KellyannePolls? pic.twitter.com/sgLxeQwGmE — Bridge Project (@BridgeProject21) September 13, 2016 Except…just this morning, Kellyanne Conway did an interview with CNN in which she accused Hillary Clinton of lying about having pneumonia. “You can laugh all you want at [Trump’s] medical report,” she said, “but as far as I can see, there are two […]

When Hillary Clinton first selected Tim Kaine as her running mate, I noted that Kaine is actually a nice guy, while Mike Pence just pretends to be one: “I don’t personally know either of these men. All I have by which to assess them is their records. I hear that both of them are nice, […]

This really doesn’t require any commentary: https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/778356178585653249

Here is where Trump’s carelessness matters: https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/778036404702019584 Trump may be directing his insults at President Obama, but if you read the transcript above, Trump is calling our military the “gang that couldn’t shoot straight.” He is categorically unfit to be commander in chief.

There isn’t a spectacle more pitiful in U.S. politics than the corporate media’s willingness to endure daily abuse from Donald Trump — and to reward him by glossing over his transgressions and focusing fire on his rival. Here are a few prime examples (one can only imagine the reaction if these insults came from Hillary Clinton): Just heard that […]

Donald Trump showed up in Flint with short notice, which was decidedly unhelpful. Flint Mayor Karen Weaver told the Detroit News, “Unexpected visits like this are difficult for us.” But Trump was less interested in being helpful to Flint than using a photo op in Flint to help his campaign. Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber […]